James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

In the tone of a teenager dealing with a naive little brother, Bonenfant said, ‘So the Soviets wipe out your cities and then sit around drinking vodka for four weeks, waiting for you to rearm and fight back?’

‘With weaponless deterrence, the Soviets do not attack in the first place. Given the space forts, the civil defense programs, the possibility of reciprocal cheating, the limited size of Russia’s clandestine arsenal, and America’s latent potential to retaliate, there are too many uncertainties.’

‘Sounds like the same old stalemate,’ said Justice Wojciechowski.

‘This was a new kind of stalemate. It had the advantage of not occurring on the edge of an infinite abyss.’

‘Your regime was really just a method of buying time, wasn’t it?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘Time,’ echoed Seabird softly. ‘Good old time,’ he muttered.

‘Rather like the policies of my clients,’ said Bonenfant smoothly. ‘No further questions.’

Justice Jefferson removed her whalebone glasses and stared into blurry space. Her eyes darted rapidly, powered by agitated thoughts.

‘Is that abolition stuff really true?’ asked George.

‘It’s a load of camel dung,’ answered Brat.

‘He’s making it all up,’ asserted Wengernook.

‘The Scriptures say nothing about it,’ noted Sparrow.

‘If they’d given me the goddamn Post Office’s budget,’ said Overwhite, ‘I might have brought off a few miracles too.’

AQUINAS TO CALL FINAL WITNESS TOMORROW, Mount Christ-church proclaimed.

Hearing his name, Jared Seldin, a small, thin boy with hair suggesting some futuristic strain of wheat, wandered into the courtroom. When he grasped the Bible to be sworn in, its weight nearly knocked him flat. The witness’s face was as dark and vibrant as polished oak. He gave his age as eight.

Eight, thought George. Too old to believe in Santa Claus, old enough to ride a two-wheeler.

Aquinas approached the stand cautiously, as if trying to get a better view of a fawn. ‘What century would you have been born in, Jared?’

‘Let’s see, 2134… that’s the twenty-second century.’

‘And where would you have lived?’

‘Habitat-Seven.’

‘Is that a country?’

‘A what?’

‘A country.’

‘What’s a country?’ asked the boy.

‘Hard to explain… Now, how would you describe Habitat-Seven?’

‘Kind of an asteroid, I guess, all hollow inside, with a ramjet. It could go at speeds close to light, ’cause we had this big funnel in front that scooped up hydrogen atoms and sent them into this fusion engine, and then the atoms go whoosh out the back. We had plans to visit a star.’

‘What star?’

‘I forget. It had a planet.’

‘Did you like Habitat-Seven, as far as you can remember?’

‘It was a lot nicer than Antarctica.’

‘Yes, Jared, it must have been.’

‘I would have had a puppy. His name would have been Ralph. Why does everything have to be so sad, Mr Aquinas?’

‘I don’t know. Tell me, Jared, did the people in Habitat-Seven ever get into a war?’

‘Is that like a country?’

‘It’s… you know. A war.’

‘A war?’

‘A war.’

‘I don’t understand, Mr Aquinas.’

Bonenfant rose, his eyes hurling freshly sharpened daggers in Aquinas’s direction. ‘Your Honors, I move that all of this witness’s testimony be stricken. He possesses no expertise concerning nuclear weapons.’

‘Mr Aquinas, are you planning to take up a more relevant line of questioning?’ asked Justice Jefferson.

‘Jared Seldin’s testimony serves to underscore the defendants’ lack of vision,’ said Aquinas.

‘Lack of vision is not a crime, sir,’ said Justice Jefferson.

‘Negligence then,’ said the prosecutor. ‘Criminal negligence.’

‘The decision on this motion is mine, Mr Aquinas, not yours,’ said Justice Jefferson, ‘and I am now ruling that Jared Seldin’s testimony be removed from the record in toto .’

Brat and Wengernook toasted each other with cocoa mugs.

‘That concludes the case for the prosecution,’ said Aquinas in a small, gelded voice.

‘Case?’ said Brat. ‘What case?’

‘I didn’t hear any case,’ said Wengernook.

The chief prosecutor returned to his table wearing an inverted smile, as if fishhooks were tugging at the corners of his mouth.

‘The part about eliminating the weapons was interesting, don’t you think?’ said George.

‘Weaponless deterrence is like bodiless sex,’ said Wengernook. ‘It gets you nowhere.’

‘A grin without a cat,’ said Randstable.

‘Smoke,’ said Brat.

‘Particularly when your agency is inadequately funded,’ said Overwhite.

If Holly had lived, wondered George, would she have traveled to Mars?

On the seventeenth of March, as the long polar night crept across the continent, creating glaciers of coal and bergs of pitch, Martin Bonenfant opened the case for the defense.

Throughout the courtroom lampwicks flared, fed by oil from killer whales and Weddell seals. Jagged shadows slithered around the glass booth. Bonenfant’s young face glowed orange, as if a candle burned inside his skull.

‘Call Major General Roger Tarmac.’

Fearlessly, Brat rose.

‘You’re gonna be great,’ said Wengernook.

‘Break a leg,’ said Randstable, who was setting up his little magnetic chess set.

‘Good luck,’ said George, whose mind was crowded with images of high-school students lowering intermediate-range missiles into a volcano.

Prompted by Bonenfant, Brat offered a rousing account of his Indiana boyhood, from which the tribunal learned that he had on two different occasions prevented school chums from drowning in the Muscatatuck River. Then came the Air Force Academy, a juggernaut progression through the ranks, and a brilliant career as a target nominator for the Strategic Air Command in the former city of Omaha.

‘Several days ago,’ said Bonenfant, ‘your name was mentioned during the testimony of Quentin Flood, founder of an organization called Generals Against Nuclear Arms.’

Brat polished his Distinguished Service Medal with his scopas glove. ‘He took exception to one of my articles, “Our Achilles Leg: Triad Theory and Land-Based Defenses.”’

‘That article identified a problem with your country’s Guardian Angel missiles,’ said Bonenfant.

‘America’s security has traditionally stood on three legs – the Triad. First, you had your submarine-launched ICBMs. Then you had your manned bombers. And the third force, which I called our Achilles Leg – that was the Guardian Angel land-based missiles.’

‘Why had they become an Achilles Leg?’

‘Because of the SS-60 – four hundred and thirty highly accurate Soviet ICBMs designed to remove our Guardian Angels in a first strike.’

‘A frightening development.’

‘After such an attack, an American President would have only two options – he could surrender, or he could retaliate against Soviet cities.’ Brat chopped the air with his hand. ‘But that would naturally bring reciprocal measures, and then he’s really in thick shit.’

‘And your solution was…?’

‘Missile Omega.’

‘The Omegas were effective against the new Soviet missiles?’

‘Such targets place a premium on response time. Omega is a fast mother. She also has terrific accuracy, long range, and ten high-yield warheads on her business end.’

‘Did you ever hear the argument that without a survivable basing mode’ – Bonenfant fixed his mouth in a condescending curve – ‘Omega had little retaliatory potential and was thus a socalled “first-strike weapon”?’